ScienceStuffIt's an old joke that lots of meats taste like chicken. But why is that? Jorge takes a bite out of this meaty topic.
Hey, welcome to sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio or Hitchham and today we are answering the question why does frog taste like chicken? Or why does alligator or rabbit for that matter. Those are all very different animals, and yet people say they all taste like poultry. To verify this, we're going to do a taste test, and then we're going to talk to several experts, including a couple of meat scientists and a biologist. It's going to take us through millions of years of evolution to find out where all meat comes from. So apologies to vegans, but get ready to get to the meat of the matter as we answer the question why does frog taste like chicken?
Hey?
Everyone, Okay, In this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into what makes meat taste to way it does. But first I wanted to find out if it really is true that so many different animals taste like chicken. I mean, it's kind of a recurring joke to have someone eat an unusual kind of meat and then say, hmm, taste like chicken. So in the name of science, I decided to try this out. And to do this, I started by going to a specialty meat store here in Los Angeles. I'm standing outside a butcher shop called Harmony Farms, and outside I see signs of turkey, chicken, lamb, buffalo, venison, rabbit, peasant, quail, deer, elk.
All right, let's go inside.
So I'm looking to buy some meat that people say taste like chicken.
On top of my hand, trying to think rabbit. They say it tastes like chicken. Rattlesteaks another one. But this is legal to sell in California. You can get in Nevada, but not in California.
I've heard alligator meat also tastes like chicken.
I want to say, that's more like a fishy taste.
Okay, but we do have that.
Also, I don't have a customer that bought some. She's a chef from downtown LA. She bought alligator to make the beach out of it.
That's interesting.
What about a frog? Do you have frog?
We also have frog in that one. Consider that like another fishy taste because you can see off the bat texture is real white and it looks like fish.
Okay, yeah, so frog, alligator? Have you tried these meats?
I tried.
I like rabbit it's pretty good. It's like a white meat you can fry, you can do a soup.
I think I will take all the ones you put it up.
Do you think some seasoning, maybe some lemon pepper seasoning, or you know, salt and peppers also good?
So you want to take the meat you don't want to with like a right good thickness. Thank you, yes, sir?
All right, exotic meats secured. The next thing I needed to do was to do a taste test. So I took each kind of meat and cooked it. I sprinkled the little salt, little corn starch, and then I roasted them and for tasters, I decided to recruit my kids. That's because A I did this the night before the edit for this episode was due, and they were the only ones willing to eat a bunch of mystery meats late at night, and b because kids are notoriously honest about what they think when it comes to food.
If you're a parent, and I think you.
Know what I'm talking about. So here's how that experiment went. Okay, I'm gonna give you four meats and you're just gonna tell me what do you think of it?
Okay?
Very dark?
Yeah, what do you think very extra quish? Oh, it was like very hard.
It's like an overpowering like gamey game me.
Tastes tastes like chicken. Does not taste like chicken. Chicken.
Probably the rabbit or the alligator alligator meat.
Yeah, that was the alligatory.
Now I can.
Say, okay, it's just a lot better. Very chicken, very chicken, chicken chicken like the texture yea, the taste and.
Taste that is actually chicken.
Oh, just kidding, it's not one.
It's rabbit. Let's have cannibalism. No, this is probably the frog meat.
Yup, what do you think it is very mushy? No, how about the taste chicken. Taste tas like chicken. That was actually chicken. Okay, last one.
Tastes like chicken. What does it look like?
Frog remains taste more like chicken than the others.
Tastes more like chicken than the chicken. Yeah. So the alligator meat definitely tastes like chicken. Tastes like overcooked. Okay. What do you think of your dad experimenting?
I'm sewing.
Okay.
I was pretty surprised by these results. So to recap, alligator doesn't quite taste like chicken. Rabbit could totally pass his chicken, and frog apparently tastes more like chicken than chicken. And this is surprising because all these animals are pretty far away from each other in the evolutionary tree of life. I mean, a chicken is a bird, frogs are amphibians, alligators are reptiles, and rabbits are mammals. They couldn't be more different from each other, and yet they all taste fairly similar.
How can that be?
To get to the bottom of this, I reached out to a couple of meat experts. The first is Professor John Gonzalez.
My name is doctor John Michael Gonzalez. I am a professor at the University of Georgia and the Department of Animal Dairy Sciences. My special reality is muscle bio ging and meat science. So we study anything from embryo development all the way through the powder rays livestock species to produce poadable and nutritious muscle products for consumers to eat. And so I've been doing this around thirteen years now professionally.
Okay, So my thinking going into this was that what people think of as meat is usually the muscles of the animal and so I wanted to know, how is the muscle of say a frog or a rabbit different than the muscle of say a chicken. Okay, so for those of us that are not familiar, meat is usually the muscle of the animals. Do all animals use the same muscles?
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say, for the most part, most animals on the earth do have the same type of skeleton muscle. And so when I think about our livestock species and anything birds, cattle, pigs, deep, you know, my dogs that are there, the overall principle, it's the same of how muscle contraction works, how the muscles put together. There is a colleague that I had from Kansas State University, and she studied the fruit fly in fly muscles, and they had the same exact biology, and so I would say, yes, for the most part, they're all exactly the same.
Wow, So maybe we should be asking whether fly meat tastes the same as chicken too.
Yeah.
I don't even know how you would be able to collect that much fly meat. I guess sure mostly must have eaten a fly once or twice in our lives of accident. So my hypothesis would be it would taste the same as chicken.
All right, this is.
A really big clue about the mystery we're trying to solve today. As different as animals like alligators, birds, raccoons, snakes, even fruit flies and dinosaurs are their meat or mussels are kind of the same. Can you dig a little bit deeper. You mentioned muscle structure. Can you give us a breakdown of what muscle is for all of these different animals.
Yeah. Yeah, the whole muscle that we're used to seeing the steak in the grocery retail case that is comprised of many bundles. Those muscle bundles are composed of muscle fibers.
So the basic unit of muscle is the muscle fiber. Some interesting facts about muscle fibers are that they're the only cells in animals and in your body with more than one nucleus. Every other cell has one nucleus each, but muscle fibers can have hundreds of nuclei. Also, the number of muscle cells you or any animal is born with is the number of muscle cells they're going to have for the rest of their lives.
Your muscle cell numbers determined that birth are certainly at depending on species. So I always tell students to compare me to the rock. He probably has a lot more muscle cells than I do. Because I don't know, I blame my mom, I guess, so she hears it should be mad at me. But but yeah, I say, my mom didn't give me a lot of muscle sell and I will admit to you, Yes, I do not work out. So that's part of the small too.
No, no, it's biology. I taken solid. Yeah, it's not your fault.
Okay.
So inside muscle fibers are repeated bundles of long proteins called actin and myocin. You might have heard of these. They pull and slide past each other, and that is how muscles contract and create a force. These two proteins are the workhorse of all movement in the animal kingdom. All animals basically use these two proteins, and that includes animals as diverse as jellyfish, octopuses, elephants, hyenas and ticks, slugs, salamanders, pterodactyls, whales, all animals. We'll get to why all animals have the same muscles later in the program, but this is one reason frogs tastes like chicken. The meat is basically made of the same proteins. If you were to strip down the meat of any animal on Earth down to the proteins acting and lycin, they would all taste the same. Now you're probably thinking, but orgey, then what makes beef taste like beef or pork tastes like pork? And you still haven't answered why specifically frogs tastes like chicken. Well, when we come back, we'll answer all of these questions and trust me, we'll serve it to you. Well done, so stay with us. You're listening to sign stuff and we're back.
Okay.
We talked about how all animals use the same two proteins myocin and actin to build their muscles, which means they should all taste the same. Everything should taste like chicken. But clearly and thankfully, if you like meat, that doesn't happen. Lamb doesn't taste like turkey, which doesn't taste like fish or snake. So what is it about the different meats that make them taste the way they do? I asked doctor Gonzalaz this question. Okay, let's get into the topic of taste in meat. What makes meat taste a certain way.
So surprisingly you don't have anything to do with the miralofibular or the mussel protein. It has to do with the fat. So it's all fat driven. Okay. So chickens, a private example, should not have a lot of fat in it, and so it's a lie lean source of protein, but doesn't have the most fat in the world, and so it's not very flavorful. And so if you think about beef has a lot more fat, people go for the beef flavor because they enjoy how that tastes, and so it all has to do with how much fat you have in there. So I go to Japan a lot eating that wagou beef. You know, I don't even really have to put salt on that type of wagoo because it's so flavorful that And so when you go and you buy different types of lean grinds and say for handiger meat eighty twenty seventy three whatever, you could probably taste the difference there of how much beefy flavor you would have going through there. And so that's why a lot of those species, you know, like frogs, that have a lot of lean tissue and not very much fat in there. They all taste the same.
So what you're saying is that really the taste of what we think of as a chicken is really just a taste of that myofibrillar, those myofibrillar sells.
Yeah, for the most part, yes, because it doesn't have a lot of fat in it. It does have a little bit of fat, but it doesn't have the most compared to the other species.
So what doctor Gonzalez is saying is that it's not really the mussel to give a meat it's distinct flavor.
It's the fat in it.
And so the reason frog or rabbit taste like chicken is that these are all lean meats with low fat, and so most of what you're left with is the protein, which is what we associate with the taste of chicken. If you had never eaten chicken in your life, and you lived in a culture that ate frog all the time, then when you did eat chicken for the first time, you would probably say it tastes like frog. In fact, the protein and the fat are so interchangeable that doctor Gonzalad says, you can make any meat taste like any other meat.
You know, I could take the fat from a lamb, and I could mix it in ground beef and make it taste like lamb a little claw, yeah, and it would be like, ooh, that's kind of different profile if you told them supposed to be beef flavors some people, let's say that, you know, wow, that's all. Or I could take some pork fat and mix it in with something and it would taste very Dutch like pork too. And so you could always manipulate by taking those fat sources and doing that. Now hardly nobody does that, but that's how you can manipulate some of those products.
That is fascinating. I feel like you're saying that all meat tastes like chicken.
Yeah, and theory, if it has zero very little fat in it, they all should taste the salmon. As being taught meat science, they said, if we took every specta fat out of a meat product and put them all in front of you, you wouldn't be able to tell us what species it is.
Wow. Okay, So that answer is the first big question we had, which is why does frog taste like chicken? And the answer is that both meats are lean with low fat, and so most of what you're tasting are the proteins which all animals share. But now this raises two one how exactly does the fat give you the unique taste of each kind of meat? And two why is it that all animals use the same muscles? To answer the first question, taker Gonzalez preferring meat to Professor Jared Legeco, another meat scientist and one who specializes in meat flavor.
I am a faculty member at Texas Tech University, and I study food and meat science. My research tends to focus on safety, but more so on the quality. Again, where we're looking at things like how meat holds up during storage, the factors that influence tenderness, juiciness, and flavor.
Fantastic. It sounds like you're a perfect expert for us to talk to today, So I thought I'd start by asking you what makes meat, any meat taste the way it does.
Right when we say it tastes, we use that term to predominantly meat flavor. Flavor is the combination of taste and aroma. So taste would be those five sensations sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and then more recently you mommy, which is the savory type sensations. But then aroma's perceived then the back of the throat through the nose. When you're eating, we have small what are referred to as volatile compounds, meaning they can just kind of float in the air, and we perceive those and so with that we get that response from both the tongue and then the nose.
Oh.
Interesting, So those aromatics come in, you said, to the back of the throat. It's not like me smelling and chewing at the same time.
It's kind of described that way that it kind of comes in through the back of the throat. Odor would be when you're maybe sniffing or smelling something prior to eating, and that can have an influence. But classically we think about the aroma kind of coming in combined with taste when the food is in the mouth during consumption.
So this is kind of interesting. First of all, your tongue really can only detect the broad strokes of flavor, whether it's generally sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or savory or mommy, what we send as complex or unique to a particular food really mostly comes from your nose, and it comes in through the back of your throat, according to doctor Legaco, and second for us to detect them as aromas. What we sense has to be volatile, meaning it has to evaporate easily and float in the air.
Okay, back to doctor Legaco.
So then what makes lamb meat taste like lamb and dug tastes like dug? You know, Byson tastes like bison.
Right, All those are going to be derived from the components of the meat products. We have enzymes breaking down skeletal muscle and releasing things that will in part tastes you mommy. In particular is from amino acids. Maybe've heard the term of aging of meat, so you have spoilage organisms. They can also impart some unique flavors oftentimes. But then the other thing that we have here are fats, and fats are unique to species. Then that's where a lot of this comes from. The components of skeletal muscle that can vary a lot too across species, but the big source of variation is from the fats. So you think about red meats, they tend to have saturated fats, but they also have a large amount of monounsaturated fats and poly unsaturated. Lamb is very unique in that it also has some branch chain fatty acids that are very I guess specific to lamb. We don't see those show up in other species. So not a lot of lamb consumers in the US. But if you are, you know it has a very unique flavor compared to be compared to, certainly to any of the poultry products.
Okay, here is a key piece of information. Animals all use the same proteins to make muscles, but they use different fats which give each meat its own signature flavor. Now I've been oversimplifying a little bit when I've said all animals use the same proteins to make muscles. It's true that all animals basically use actin and myocin to make muscles, but how those proteins are arranged can vary. And this is where the concept of red meat and white meat comes in. Here's how doctor Legeko explains it.
So maybe a metaphor as you think about cars are all similar for the most part. Right, they have four wheels, maybe some doors, so they have a cross species similar components, right, But it's how they're put together, and so muscle fibers are going to vary in their type or composition.
So there's a different muscle fibers. How many would you say there are.
Well, there's really three or four predominant types. We have what's referred to as type one, and this is really where the term red meats come from, because they have the metabolism that lends them to appear more red. They are doing more predominantly aerobic type metabolism. The metaphor there is like the long distance runners, right, So they're using oxygen and with that they require a lot of myoglobin, which is a red pigment molecule that kind of makes them look red. And then we have a few that are type two. That's not incredibly important, but if we just lump all the twos together, you go to the white meats. So they're short bursts of energy you think about like a bird flapping its wings. It's really rapid, and they tend to be those that use a lot of glucose for their metabolism and contract really rapidly, and they appear more white because they don't require the amount of oxygen that we would see over for the red fibers.
So there are different types of meat and they have different color, but what really makes them taste different is how much fat they keep around to use as energy. The slower red meat uses more fat, whereas the faster white meat uses more glucose.
The type ones tend to, because of their metabolism, need fat associated with them and near them so that they can do their metabolism. Your locomotive muscles tend to be more towards that type two. White type fiber poultry is a great example. You go over to the breast meat. There's a very lean muscle. There's a lack of fat associated with that muscle because of the fiber type within it.
I see that fiber type doesn't need as much fat lying around it, right, all right? The last thing I asked Firleigeka was how do we go from those fats in the meat to the flavors we smell through the bag of our throats. Now, what's the connect ch between the fatty types of fats and the flavor.
There's some research that is becoming stronger that shows that we may be able to perceive some fatty acids on the tongue. But classically we talk more about the fat being degraded during cooking to form smaller volatile components. That's where we get that flavor is through the breakdown of those during cooking. You can also see this in storage, and if it becomes too predominant, you get off odors, off flavors. If there's too much breakdown during storage.
During storage, you might ruin those delicious smelling fatty acids.
Yeah.
Right, So then it's those fatty acids. When they get cooked, they break down into volatail compounds which go up to our nose, and that tell us us, hey this is lamb, or hey this is meat.
Or bit or anything.
Yeah.
I see.
It kind of sounds like if someone lost their ability to smell completely, then a lot of these meats would taste the same. Is that true?
You know, it's a great question. I don't know the answer, but that's a really good hypothesis. If we can gather enough people that have that condition, then I guess we could test it out.
Okay, when we come back, we're going to tackle the last question in this meaty mystery, which is why is it that every animal on Earth uses the same muscles? Just how far back in evolution does the taste of chicken go. We're going to find out, So stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back, Okay, we are answering the question why do frogs taste like chicken? And so far we've learned that it's the unique fat content of a meat that determines its flavor, and the reason frog tastes like chicken is that both kinds of meat are pretty lean and at their core. Basically, all animal muscle is the same bugs, sea creatures, dogs, cats, lizards, birds, They all use the same two proteins acting in miocin to move. So to really answer the question of why frog tastes like chicken, we need to go back and figure out why every animal on Earth uses the same muscles. In other words, why does every animal on the planet in theory tastes like chicken. To answer this question, I reached out to a scientist who thinks he's found the origin of muscles, doctor Ulrich technav.
Well.
I'm a professor for developmental biology at the University of Vienna, and I have a long standing interest in the evolution of development, which also sometimes is shortly termed by evo devo.
If you think of worms and sea urchins and sea stars and.
Vertebrates, they all looked extremely different from each other, but we all are related, you know, we all come from a common ancestor.
I was going to say, evil Divo sounds like an eighties rock band.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was coined by somebody in the US.
I forgot who it was. I think that's what Americans are usually very good for, you know, coining these kind of channes.
I guess the main question we're asking you today is what is the origin of muscle tissue?
Right? What if I had the answer that I would stop researching?
Okay, doctor tech now is being a little modest here. In twenty twelve, he and several colleagues published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature titled Independent Evolution of Striated Muscle in Nidarians and by Latarians, in which they trace the evolution of must back to before animals even existed. That's right before animals existed.
So when you ask, you know how the muscles arise.
Later studies have shown that even certain microbes, the aki are, which are dating back like three billion years, you know, they even have filamentous acting in them. So this is a very very ancient protein, you know, which we can trace back in evolution very deeply.
All right, what doctor tech now is saying is that actin one of the two key proteins in all muscles, was around pretty close to the beginning of life itself. It's been found in Archaea, which is one of the basic life forms that have been around since before any animal or plant or fungi existed billions of years ago, and actual muscle what's called smooth muscle and strayated muscle, can be found in jellyfish, which is one of the oldest animals that evolved about five hundred million years ago. So the same muscle structure you and I have has been around for a long time.
Because if you think about what animals are really known for, I mean, they can move, you know, and some can move very fast.
It's all based on muscle movement. So that's why it's hard to imagine once you have evolved that you would lose it again because it means it also allows you to explore new territories, which allows you more easily to disperse. So there's a lot of reasons why muscles are important.
So the reason frogs and chickens and pretty much every animal on Earth have the same muscle is that it evolved in its basic form a long time ago. Basically since the beginning of animals and it stuck around. In fact, you might say it's what made animals animals because it allows help them to move. All right, I think that answers our question for today. Why does frog taste like chicken? The answer is that actually all meats taste like chicken because all animals use the same proteins to build their muscles. The structure of muscle is something that evolves super early in the evolutionary history of animals, and it's stuck around. It's a useful mutation. Then, what gives a meat its unique flavor is actually the fat, which is related to what the animal eats. It's biology and the kind of energy each type of muscle uses. Okay, I'm going to close out the episode by asking our experts a potentially tasteless question, which is how does one become a meat scientist.
It's you know, it's not your normal field. Right when you go to like the kindergartener graduation, they're talking about being a fireman, a doctor, whatever it may be. It rarely does a meat scientists unlock, if ever. But it's it's a very dynamic feel, you know, It's there's a lot of aspects to it.
Yeah, meat science really cool world. It's funny because I'll tell you one last story. I was providing products for a fundraiser and they're like always a meat scientist at the University of Georgia. And one person there was like, Phil, that's a made up thing. Just started laughing, like that meat science is made up. You said it right, Friday. I just started laughing like, yeah, a lot of people are unaware of you know that. See, science is a discipline. There's a lot of science that goes into what we do. So thank you for letting us let me have this platform to talk about it.
I feel like you're saying that when you bring home work, you're literally bringing home the bacon. Yes, thanks for joining us. See you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production of iHeartRadio bringing and produced by Me or hit Chim, Credited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey peckrom And you can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
